[NYTr] Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Riaz K Tayob 

The New York Times - Dec 3, 2007 (no URL provided)


Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts 

By CELIA W. DUGGER

LILONGWE, Malawi --- Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. 
After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 
million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to 
the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more 
corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other 
country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of 
tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen 
sharply. In October, the United Nations Children's Fund sent three tons 
of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished 
children, to Uganda instead. "We will not be able to use it!" Juan 
Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef's deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi's extraordinary turnaround --- one with broad 
implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa --- with one 
word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi 
depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked 
country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate 
fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively 
subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in
a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi's newly elected president, decided
to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to 
reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical 
reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi's soil, like that 
across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, 
of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

"As long as I'm president, I don't want to be going to other capitals 
begging for food," Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior 
civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his 
advisers, "Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use 
the soil and the water we have."

The country's successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader 
reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty
in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the
basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education,
credit and agricultural research.

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, 
is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As 
its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, 
impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to 
feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow 
or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food 
and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi's leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they 
reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid 
fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an 
antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to 
eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that 
Malawi's farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use 
the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane 
Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank's record on African 
agriculture, the bank's own internal watchdog concluded in October not 
only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer 
prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed 
to recognize that improving Africa's declining soil quality was 
essential to lifting food production.

"The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters 
mounted," said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who 
lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi's fertilizer 
program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should 
invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa's farmers.

Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, 
abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn 
harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn 
production leapt to 2.7 billion metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 billion in 
2007 from 1.2 billion in 2005, the government reported.

"The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and 
inorganic fertilizer, full stop," said Stephen Carr, who has lived in 
Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank's principal 
agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. "This technology has not been 
used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access
to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily."

"The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers 
wanted," he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi's 2007 
bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an 
independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain,
found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this
year's increase in corn production.

The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing 
wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and 
Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a 
well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy "has the 
potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many 
Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught."

Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi's southern and central regions 
said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their
bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi's staff
of life.

In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose 
husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two 
ox-cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a
cart.

Last year, roughly half the country's farming families received coupons 
that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to 
nourish an acre of land, for around $15 --- about a third the market 
price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant 
less than half an acre.

Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That 
season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough 
fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been 
reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn 
prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country's 
entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and
corruption.

Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His 
strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was 
one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local 
Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children begging 
for food at his door.

"I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and
every one," he said. "It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed."

But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the 
subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his 
jurisdiction since 2005.

"It's quite marvelous!" he exclaimed.

Malawi's determination to heavily subsidize fertilizer and the payoff
in increased production are beginning to change the attitudes of
donors, say economists who have studied Malawi's experience.

The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8 
million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabi Sanchez, an economist 
with the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced because of 
the $74 million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140 million.

"It was really a good economic investment," he said.

The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American
food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to
help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support
for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of
it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International
Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in
delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that
effort.

But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to Malawi, said in a recent 
interview that the subsidy program had worked "pretty well," though it 
displaced some commercial fertilizer sales.

"The plain fact is that Malawi got lucky last year," he said. "They got 
fertilizer out while it was needed. The lucky part was that they got
the rains."

And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of
subsidies aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters
private markets.

Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi's 
policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy 
to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn 
production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room 
for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out.

"The issue is, let's do a better job of it," said David Rohrbach, a 
senior agricultural economist at the bank.

Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent, Malawi's farmers have 
embraced the subsidies. And the government moved this year to give its 
people a more direct hand in their distribution.

Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading
arms of a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as
the planting season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the
village's 53 families.

"Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the
orphans?" asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.

Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet 
called out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families 
rearing children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.

There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling 
began among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming
year as their neighbors' fertilized corn fields turned deep green.

Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila, rose. 
Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he acted 
out a silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn to
sell on the sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women
howled with laughter. The tension fled.

He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.

"I don't want anyone to complain," he said. "It's not me who chose.
It's you."

The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then
dispersed to their homes and fields.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company